320 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
doctrine of adaptation, his teaching concerning the hierarchy of 
struggles culminating in group rivalry for excellence carried on by 
free assimilation, by provoking imitation, and by an organized 
propaganda for the extension of its culture. We considered next 
a group of writers who have exalted the place of the individual as 
the instigator of social movements in the line of better adaptation 
and welfare, as Carlyle with his Great Man theory and James with 
his modification of this interpreted by his doctrine concerning the 
“Energies of Men,” also Ross with his analysis of social control, 
concluding that natural sanctions must be supplemented by those 
that are artificial, created by the élite. We turned then to the 
function of idealization as set forth by Comte, Ross and Baldwin, 
noting its expression in art, reflective morality and religion and 
its culmination in reverence for ideal personality and religious 
adaptation. We concluded that idealization especially when 
reflective was one of the most potent factors in social progress. 
In the study of this process of active spiritual (including social) 
adaptation, several concepts stand out with great clearness: 
idealization, innovation, reflective imitation, rivalry in excel- 
lence, and the provoking of imitation by the power of example, all 
of these processes, though primarily individual, having a social 
analogue. This analogy between the psychical activity of in- 
dividuals and social unities, together with the fact that the 
individual is a social product and should have a social goal, war- 
rants the use of the term social-personalism to indicate the social 
philosophy that has emerged in outline from our study of the 
development of the doctrine of adaptation as a theory of social 
progress. By this phrase is meant that the acme of cosmic 
evolution is not the social group even in its collective activity 
(unless it can be interpreted as a quasi-personality), but the 
individual person, for personality alone has power over the cosmic 
process, the group always acting on the initiative of persons, — 
but this personality socially determined and with a social goal. 
To analyze this concept more in detail: Mind is superior to 
matter for it knows, feels and controls it, within limits. Reflective 
creation is the highest form of intellectual activity and personal 
